


The Happiest Man On Earth

by rilla



Category: One Direction (Band), Zayn Malik (Musician)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-25 22:54:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9850346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilla/pseuds/rilla
Summary: 1d at hogwarts, written for the tumblr prompt 'one of them looks in the mirror of erised and sees something unexpected'.





	

**Author's Note:**

> please forgive my hp knowledge for being a little rusty. sorry if i've sorted them in the wrong houses, but lbr: it doesn't matter much in this particular fic.

“This is it,” Louis says. His silver and green tie is twisted halfway around his neck and his hair is in disarray but his voice inside the chamber seems quieter than it did in the corridor. Zayn can hear them breathing, all five of them, as their footsteps halt and the studded door swings shut behind them. Above them, the ceiling is made of a million stars. Louis is the first one to move again, towards the shrouded shape in the middle of the room. “I thought,” he says, oddly flat in this space, “I thought that there would be more here.”

“It’s all right,” Niall says. He clears his throat and Zayn feels his eyes on him for a moment before he takes a step forward. “So this is where Harry Potter did it?”

“Where he trained all those kids,” Louis says, “yeah.” He pulls his wand out of his pocket and sends sparks ricocheting off the constellations above them. “Bang, bang, bang, mate. I would have been in Dumbledore’s Army if I’d been here at the time.”

“They wouldn’t have asked you, Slytherin,” Liam says, his corners of his eyes creasing as he smiles easily and moves to stand towards Niall. Zayn’s just left with Harry then, the quiet presence of him, his midnight blue and copper tie and his messy head of hair. He doesn’t know Harry that well. They’ve always been on opposite sides of the group somehow, vying for Louis’s attention back in second year, sitting either side of Niall in Transfiguration now in seventh year. He sometimes thinks the only time they ever made eye contact was when they both had ill-advised crushes on Liam in fourth year, although he knows now that Liam is the straightest person ever to straight. It’s probably for the best.

Harry takes a step towards Zayn and smiles at him, down a little because Harry’s two inches taller than him. His teeth are rabbity, but not in a bad way. It’s almost endearing, because Harry’s quiet a lot of the time and inexplicable the rest of it, but those teeth make him more human. In front of them, Louis is shoving Liam a little too hard while Niall frowns and does his best to stay out of the way. “What do you think you would have done if you’d been here back then?” Harry asks.

“What, when Umbridge was here and Voldemort was fucking everything up?” Zayn asks.

Harry exhales a laugh. “Pretty much.”

“I’d have escaped.” Zayn taps the Slytherin crest on his robes. “Obviously.”

Harry nods slowly. “Maybe.”

“You would have been in here, saving lives.”

“I don’t know about that.” Harry bites his lip.

“Ravenclaws did a lot of good stuff in the war.”

“So did Slytherins.”

“Well.” Zayn huffs out a breath. “Not at Hogwarts. And if literally everyone else I knew was legging it…”

“I don’t blame them for leaving or anything.”

Zayn actually believes him, somehow, even though everyone else in the world seems to blame the Slytherins for leaving the school that night. Zayn’s mum was at the school at the time, Hufflepuff, second year. His dad was a Ravenclaw third year. They don’t talk about what it was like back then. He shrugs a shoulder. “Yeah, well.”

In front of them Niall’s laughing helplessly, Louis’s arms wrapped tightly around his waist as he struggles to get away. Liam’s standing beside them with some stupid massive goofy smile on his face like they’re the funniest people in the world. Zayn feels a pang of affection for them all that’s almost painful and he feels himself smile. When he looks back at Harry, Harry’s eyes are big and intense, fixed on Zayn’s face. “Have I got something on me?” he asks, mostly joking.

“No, I just…” Harry shrugs, almost helpless.

Zayn doesn’t know what the fuck that’s all about. He squints out a bit of a smile and Harry beams then, slow and almost lovely as though a sunbeam’s breaking over his face. They hold each other’s eyes for a moment and Zayn feels his breath catch in his throat. He’s half dizzied like an unexpected precipice is opening up in front of him, like when he and Louis were flying high above the Forest that night when they snuck out of the dungeons with their brooms. He remembers Louis standing up on his broom in front of him with his arms outstretched, his hair whipping in the wind and his laughter bright and maniacal. Zayn had tried it himself for the first time, stupidly high on the night air, and felt his knees almost buckle before collapsing back onto his broom again. That’s what looking into Harry Styles’s eyes feels like sometimes. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do about it.

In front of them Louis has lost interest in Niall, which makes sense because he loses interest in most things a matter of seconds after he finds them. He’s striding towards the side of the room, to a series of framed photographs there. “Look, it’s Harry Potter and Ron Weasley,” he says. “Did I ever tell you lot I once met Ginny Weasley? I will say, she has aged excellently—”

Zayn tunes him out. To his side, Harry looks at him and pulls a delicately disgusted face, and Zayn laughs accidentally. Together they walk forward past the others to the shadowy shape at the centre of the room. There’s a veil over it, old and almost sheer; beneath it Zayn catches a hint of silver, before he grabs the cloth and pulls it off entirely. In the mirror he sees himself, older than he is now. More facial hair, tattoos curling around his fists. That’s something that he and Harry have in common, their tattoos, the mermaid blinking up from Harry’s forearm, the birds chattering silently on his chest. If his shirt’s unbuttoned a little when the five of them are all somewhere at night, in the Hufflepuff common room in front of the dying fire, at the top of the Astronomy tower; when they’re all together at night, smoking and talking lazily and laughing, and Zayn can see the mermaid mouthing songs on Harry’s arm and the birds dancing on his chest, he knows that’s a good night.

In the mirror he can see a lotus blossom on his own arm, its petals rippling in an invisible wind. He’s wearing a shirt that’s smudged with paint and he’s standing in front of a canvas that’s so big that it’s almost a wall. It’s filled with colours, swirls, designs; it’s the most beautiful thing in the world and Zayn stares at it hungrily. He wants to memorise this, drink it in. The mind can’t create anything new, he tells himself, this has come from you, you are capable of this. He tears his eyes away from the image in the mirror and it all makes sense as he sees the words etched over the top of it. Erised. That old mirror, the one in the legends—

“What the fuck are you two looking at?” Louis shouts from across the room, and Zayn says, “It’s the Mirror of Erised,” his voice half cracking.

Beside him Harry says, at the same time: “It’s just me and Zayn in some old mirror.”

Zayn pauses and turns to him. “What?”

“It’s—” Harry says. His eyes are wide as he turns back to the mirror and Zayn hears him swallow. “It’s—”

“The Mirror of fucking Erised, lads,” Louis says, and slides in front of them. He’s quiet for a moment, and then he says, soft and wondering: “Oh.”

“I want to see,” Liam says, waiting his turn anyway, and then he smiles at Zayn and then Harry. “What did you two see in there?”

“I saw,” Zayn says, and clears his throat. He feels as though he’s reeling. “I saw myself with a sort of – in front of this big canvas. Art. It was beautiful.”

“You’ll do it some day, mate,” Liam says firmly. “Haz?”

“I saw…” Colour’s flaring on Harry’s cheeks. He looks at the ground and then at Liam again. Zayn looks hard at him but he seems to be avoiding Zayn’s gaze. “I saw myself with my NEWT results,” he says then. “I did really well.”

“You massive geek,” Liam says affectionately, and Harry laughs, disjointed and crackly.

Finally Louis moves aside so that Niall can take his place in front of the mirror. His face is drawn when he comes over to Zayn and leans against his side. “Fucking hell,” he murmurs.

“El?” Zayn asks.

“El,” Louis confirms.

“You could owl her,” Zayn suggests gently.

“We said it was better for her to live her own life after she finished school last year,” Louis says. He looks as though his face isn’t fitting onto his skull properly.

“We’re almost done,” Zayn points out.

“Well.” Louis looks at the floor and then up again, eyes squinted against some invisible light. “Maybe.”

“Yeah.” Zayn puts an arm around his shoulders and pulls Louis in close. He sees Harry looking over at the two of them, birdlike and curious, and Zayn feels something coil inside his stomach, warm and blooming.

Liam sees his mum and dad standing with him, proud and happy, and Niall won’t tell the rest of them what he sees, because “It’s private.”

“Next Voldemort, you mark my words,” Louis says darkly, and yells out as Niall casts a swift jelly-legs jinx on him.

“So what did you see?” Niall says then, leaving Louis writhing on the floor and moving forward towards Harry as Liam makes a move backwards to remove the jinx. Zayn tries to eavesdrop without looking too conspicuous. “Was it—”

“Shut up,” Harry mumbles, and Niall laughs, just a bit, before putting Harry in a gentle headlock and kissing the top of his stupid curly head.

They leave the room together, the five of them, and split apart at the top of the stairs so that Liam can go off to Hufflepuff and Niall and Harry can slip up the tower to the Ravenclaw common room. Zayn and Louis begin to move down the stairs in the dark, and Louis says, soft and conspiratorial, “Harry was lying, wasn’t he?”

“What?”

“About the Mirror. You know.”

“I don’t know.”

Louis raises a meaningful eyebrow and Zayn rolls his eyes. He can feel his face heating up in the dark. “Shut up,” he says, and Louis laughs at him just like he always does.

They move as silent as possible through the school. Zayn thinks it should seem frightening at night, what with the teachers and high hallowed ceilings and actual ghosts and all the deaths that have happened here, but funnily enough it doesn’t. Enough magic has seeped into the walls that it all seems somehow golden instead. They’re almost down in the dungeons when there’s a noise behind them, footsteps and a cough, and—

“I’d recognise that asthma anywhere,” Louis says triumphantly.

Zayn has never been sure what exactly asthma is, but he knows that Harry has it, because he’s seen his inhaler, which is a sort of Muggle thing that Zayn doesn’t particularly understand. He feels his heart clawing its way up his throat as Louis says, “I’ll see you back in our room,” and slips away into the shadows. Zayn stands still in the dark corridor. He feels as though his future is coming to find him.

Harry appears then, skidding down a stairwell, his eyes flying open wide in surprise when he sees Zayn. “I thought – I don’t know what I thought.”

“That you’d have to guess the Slytherin password?” Zayn folds his arms over his chest. He’s Harry’s deepest desire, isn’t he? That’s so damn overwhelming. Harry isn’t his own deepest desire. That’s maybe worse.

“Frogspawn,” Harry says. “Rattlesnakes.”

“Pearl dust,” Zayn says.

“Oh.” There’s a moment of quiet that hangs between them. The corner of Harry’s mouth twitches and then he says, “Seems fitting.”

“Yeah.” Zayn’s starting to smile; he can feel it and he doesn’t know whether he wants to stop himself.

“Listen, I just—” Harry begins, and Zayn gives him time and space to think and speak. After a moment Harry says, twisting back one of his curls, “I don’t want to make anything awkward.”

There isn’t really enough friendship between them for things to be awkward, but Zayn understands. He nods. “Of course not.”

More quiet. Harry’s chewing his bottom lip but he isn’t leaving, not quite yet. Zayn decides to rescue him. “Look,” he says. “We can talk about this. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” His heart’s racing and from the look on Harry’s face he feels the same. “Look, I just—”

“I sometimes think,” Harry says, “that I’m just – I’m sort of lonely. And I—”

“I’m always here.” The words burst out of Zayn as though they’ve been waiting years to erupt. “If you want me. If you need someone.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Harry’s mouth is pink like pressed petals and there’s a look in his eyes that seems so pure and wondering that Zayn’s stomach is turning itself inside out. “I just don’t want you to feel pressured. Or as though you’re the only thing that would make me happy so you have to—”

“I want to,” Zayn says, and Harry says: “Oh.”

Zayn smiles at him and Harry smiles back, slow and almost dazed. “We’ll talk tomorrow,” Zayn says, and Harry says, “All right,” looking as though he’s carrying the best secret in the world.

“You fucking loser,” Zayn tells him and Harry laughs as though he’s on top of the world. Zayn turns away and then he feels Harry’s fingers around his wrist, pulling him back, warm and certain. Their mouths meet, too hard and too awkward, too much teeth, Zayn’s nose almost crunching into Harry’s, and Harry breaks away and says, “Sorry,” out of breath, and Zayn realises that at some point over the last couple of seconds, Harry’s arms made their way around his waist.

“It’s okay,” he says. He hasn’t been held like this before. He’s only been with girls and they were all shorter than him. He loops an arm experimentally around Harry’s neck and touches the curls at the nape of his neck. They’re surprisingly soft and silky. “It’s okay.” He leans in and kisses Harry again, more gentle this time. His lips are warm and dry and Zayn likes the way he smells, clean and fresh. He touches Harry’s chest with the flat of his palm and imagines Harry’s birds dancing beneath his clothes. He kisses Harry for the third time, deeper now. The corridor’s so silent that he hears the slick of their mouths moving together, hears the way that Harry’s breath catches. Harry tastes like the half-melted chocolate frogs that Liam produced when they all needed sustenance right before they finally found the Room of Requirement. When the kiss breaks they press their foreheads together and Zayn feels the warmth of Harry’s breath. His green eyes and long lashes are merging into a blur, he’s so close.

“Tomorrow,” Harry says, like a promise, as they unfold from each other.

“Tomorrow,” Zayn agrees, and watches Harry go, watches him turn to dimple over his shoulder, flushed and ever so pretty in this dim light. When Zayn looks down, the swallow on his hand is beating its wings.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm flomps @ tumblr, come and say hi! any comments on here are very much appreciated.


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